


The Gold Room

by atria



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Bullying, F/M, Gen, Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 15:58:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16601066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: Fuji shows up at school in a skirt. Seigaku goes haywire. Deliriously happy ending. Title as in, 'We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want.' A rather cracky take on the everyone-in-PoT-is-so-gay trope.





	The Gold Room

**Author's Note:**

> I say this is cracky but please let me know if parts of this are insensitive or upsetting to you. I'd love to fix!

Ryuuzaki-sensei is on a roll.

"The tennis clubroom,'' she rumbles, "is not a love hotel." Takes note of the pink cheeks and the studiously downcast gazes with a sigh. Sexual profligacy and tennis proficiency are old comrades at this school. As with most things, she blames Nanjiroh for starting it. 

Fuji watches her watch the team. Sumire-chan is less wrong than many adults, but in this, she is utterly representative of her kind. Think, doesn't she think? Despite the rumours and the red faces, not a wayward condom, not a discarded bra in sight. A harem of physically active young men equipped with their own supply closet, besieged on all sides by bouquets of breast, and no one stops to smell the flowers, so to speak. Today's game of cat-and-mouse was instigated by Momo, who parted the folds of a blouse in the sanctum of the innermost clubroom closet, stared down at the holy grail of male teenage sexuality, and decided he had something pressing to yell at Kaidoh. They ended up with their hands in each other's shirts as easy as breathing, in full view of Ryuuzaki-sensei no less, but the girl was still in the clubroom when sensei went in looking for the first aid kit. And so. 

Fuji doesn't know for sure how one might react to the female body, but he's read about it in books. Momo without a doubt had not behaved as teenage boys ought. Nor, he suspects, would most of his teammates. The thought of Tezuka alone with a girl makes him shudder. Poor hypothetical girl.

Fuji offers the girl from the clubroom his candy bar when he runs into her in school, circling aimlessly in front of the bathrooms. It's limited edition wasabi Kit Kat, a rare treat. Her name is Hiromi. She startles, then shakes her head no, but she smiles. 

Later he hears a knot of girls whispering that Hiromi got put down by the boy on the tennis team, poor Hiromi, with a sort of vindictive delight in their pity. Fuji makes to move away. He hates that sort of thing.

Then one girl says, "Not all the boys on the team are so bad though, I heard Fuji-senpai gave her candy afterwards. Fuji-senpai is so nice."

Her friend giggles. "He is, but that's because he's barely a boy. I don't get girls who like him. He's a little off, don't you think? Like a girl in big tennis clothes."

Fuji pauses. The caricature is so familiar it barely stings. He's harmless and ancillary, weird Fuji, accessory to his teammates' antics only by proxy. Unlike the others, his deviance is so obvious it passes mostly unseen. He has license.

It's Tuesday, and Fuji has an idea.

 

*

Growing up, Fuji envied girls in general and Yumiko in particular. Certainly not for the house chores or the expectation of diffidence, nor was it it the make-up or dresses, though those were fine, fun. Some of his best memories of his siblings were of them three in front of mother's mirrors, lined up and indistinguishable as dango with their sweet moist lips and the dust and glitter on their cheeks and eyelids like so much sugar. He loved those days.

But no. That wasn't what he wanted, what he lacked. Fuji was jealous, instead, of his sister's friends. Specifically, her girl friends. Girls with their hair and breath floating in each other's faces, fingers knotted and sweating freely on each other as they walked on the streets, touching without intent to injure or best, stroking their hair and clothes and shoulders slowly, luxuriantly, taking their time in the caress. Their time together seemed like one liquid embrace, and Fuji resented that it was as forbidden to him as adulthood or a real friend, someone who read his books and knew his mind and could play tennis with him without intent to win, as playing once was.

It is a point of amusement that the friends he eventually finds are all jocks. Their singular focus on their game makes them easy with everything else, their time, their touching. Fuji, on his part, plays with eyes closed but his heart watchful of his friends. He learns them like flashcards, sorts them in his mind. He learns that he loves them, but he doesn't love them all the same. It isn't even physical. Yes, he wishes he could nose Eiji's hair, red and waxy as a fake cherry. The fact that Eiji lets him on occasion, purrs into his hand, is part of why he loves him. It is the letting that he loves, however, not the mere fact of touching. He longs for more. To nuzzle Eiji's throat, scritch the soft belly he shows in those moments. Or Taka-san. His river-stone eyes, the way feeling wavers on his face like light through liquid. Fuji wants to touch him while he makes an expression, has a thought, decipher his feeling like a new script, a blind man's braille. 

He wants to know them utterly: it has nothing to do with the touch itself. It's nearly intellectual, this thirst.

And it is abundantly clear that they thirst for each other too. Or, clear to anyone who's mentally cut their ties with teenage normalcy. Fuji isn't sure they know, and even if they do, if they realise it is possible to yearn in this way, to move in its thrall for years till you forget it wasn't always there, the way people forget the smell of their breath. Momo for one puts his face to Kaidoh's or Echizen's with a look of eagerness rather like the one he gets around hamburgers. Oishi would never admit he needs Eiji as keenly as he thinks Eiji needs him, it's why Eiji plays the child around him, why Oishi lets him. And Tezuka, sainted only son Tezuka, who always needed a rival as keenly as he did a friend. He won't let himself be kind to Echizen, though he follows him around as eagerly as the sad parent of a particularly self-sufficient child. Instead he glares. He grumbles. He tips Echizen out of the nest with force and can't rest until Echizen comes staggering back again. As with anything Fuji has seen him love, Tezuka wields Echizen against himself, as punishment.

Fuji is Tezuka's opposite. As a rule, Fuji dislikes punishment, or authority, or zero-sum games. He despises the things good boys who want to become real men are told they must do. Instead he likes girls. He likes skirts. He likes the breeze around his privates, the loosing of restriction, the communion of his body with other bodies, the wind.

He looks in the mirror and enjoys what he sees.

*

The skirt falls to mid-thigh. It's a nice length, not shapeless, not risque. It's a skirt that's comfortable with itself, with the jut of knobby knees below the hem. Fuji's legs are lightly scarred, but shapely. The hair on the calves is downy, barely in need of a shave. Perhaps God gave him the wrong chromosome; today, Fuji lets it be. He smiles at the mirror, confident in the feeling that it's not about how he looks. He still looks like himself. Today he can say anything, touch anybody. He takes a breath and pushes at the bathroom door.

The stares begin in the first corridor on the second floor. By six-thirty, students have started to trickle in. Fuji made sure to be early so he will be here first, already in class and sheathed in a chair by the time the mob arrives. At first they're too stunned to be cruel. They point and stare. Slowly, they begin to snicker. Fuji ignores them -- it's harder than he thought, but not more than he can bear -- slips into his chair with his heart thudding. Home safe, for now.

It is a slight relief that Eiji shows up late. He staggers in five minutes after morning announcements on the intercom; Watanabe-sensei is early for English and they are spared talking though he can sense Eiji start, then stare. 

"Fuji-kun." For better or worse, sensei calls him first to read the passage. He pushes his palms on the desk -- they're slippery with sweat -- and stands to a collective gasp.

"Fuji-kun!'' Watanabe sounds strangled. Fuji is amused, then briefly sorry for her. Though he was the one who slipped the skirt on in the toilet, checked it in the mirror, this doesn't feel quite real. She gets ahold of herself and thunders at him to explain. He doesn't say a word. He smiles. She gives up and tells him to get out of that skirt, for god's sake. 

"I don't have anything to change into," Fuji says honestly. She sends him to the nurse's, and with a burst of courage, he steps in front of forty pairs of roving eyes, including his best friend's. To the nurse's, then. The acid in his stomach is disappointment and relief both.

But--"They didn't have my size," Fuji reports when he shows up again in the same skirt, creased slightly from the nurses' insistence that he help with the search, they didn't have time for imbecile students like him. He's telling the truth. There was one vomit-stained pair of pants in size M, but between the large junior boys who haven't hit their growth spurts and the small seniors, Fuji's size is in demand for once.

"This isn't fashion. You're not clothes-shopping," Watanabe snaps, sweating. She seems about to say more, but the class chortles then. There's an edge of hysteria to the sound: anyone who knows their way around crowd control will not risk stirring a group that sounds like that. 

She could always send him home. Fuji sees her pause, guesses she's thinking it. But it's Tokyo, and the teachers must weigh national exam scores against moral outrage, and one always triumphs. It's not the morals. Fuji stays the full three hours till lunch, repeating some version of the scene with each teacher who comes to the class next. 

Each time, his heart beats faster, sinks a little lower. Eiji still hasn't talked to him yet.

*

At lunch, Eiji jumps to go to Oishi. Fuji thinks he might do it a little faster than he usually does. They will probably discuss him before coming up with one response, one attitude, shutting him out entirely in the meantime. It stings. He rummages in the drawer for his bento, thinking he'll eat at his desk today, but comes up only with the square of cloth his mother folds around the box. He sighs and folds his arms on his desk. The cafeteria seems very far, a labyrinthe of corridors and stupid remarks. A nap, then.

The morning has strained him. Fuji sleeps through afternoon calculus and music appreciation. No one wakes him. Probably no teacher wants to deal with the only good student in the dunce class turning into a pervert, a freak. Fuji comes to two and a half hours later with a crick in his neck and a sour taste in his mouth, grateful for his teachers' lack of fortitude. He needed that rest to get ready. 

It never used to matter that Fuji was half a beat too slow to get in line or laugh at a joke. His peers assumed his talent was impairment, permitted his slight deviance. Just what sort of talent it was unclear: Fuji was the tennis genius, but not as physical as Tezuka; good enough at school, but no facility in a science lab, unlike Oishi; well-liked on account of all those things but by no means a leader. They let him be weird Fuji, and his difference became as much a part of him to them as his smile and his half-shut eyes: so regular it was pedestrian, if not ordinary. Fuji became cliche so he wouldn't have to be himself with the rest. He resents how easy they make it for him, but he's always acted this way. Even at home his parents know Yumiko and Yuuta, their many wants and tantrums, better than their quiet middle child who smiles.

After three years, he thinks Tezuka might sense his temper and his secret bursts of pride more keenly than his parents, Eiji better at making him laugh than his sister, Taka-san gentler with his moods than anyone he has ever known.

He can't help it, he loves them. For once his gift for hitting a ball in the right place did him a favour, he never could give up tennis if it meant giving up them.

He performs for his teammates as much as he performs for anyone else, but differently. He tests. Forfeits a championship game for injury, throws five games in a set to teach the boy who hurt his baby brother a lesson. Fuji pushes, shows himself up as egregiously as he can. They notice as much as teenage boys can be expected to. They win their games and ask him along and fold him in their gossip and long-armed hugs and juvenile inside jokes. They let him photograph them in all their states. They're so silly. They're so much truer than anyone else he knows, certainly himself.

So none of this will be real till afternoon practice.

 

*

Inui comes up to him first. It's surprising, they've never been close.

"Fuji," he says, pushing at his glasses in the empty clubroom. Nervous, then. "I apologise for taking your lunch today. Kikumaru gave it to me in case I could find something of use."

Fuji startles. Not just a random prank.

"I was planning to analyse the contents of your meal in case you were feeling unwell, but the chemistry lab's equipment proved unequal to the task." Inui is talking in the style of a textbook, something he has mostly gotten over since freshman year. He must be very anxious. "I thought I better ask you personally: Have you experienced any symptoms of, ah, distraction? Or dizziness, nausea, evidence of psychotropic chemicals?''

"Inui, just what sort of substances did you think I took?"

Inui doesn't say anything. His glasses glint. Fuji can't help it, he's close to laughing.

"If not, why did you do it?"

Inui sounds genuinely perplexed. It annoys Fuji again. "Do I need a reason?"

"But you must have known how people would react," Inui fidgets with his glasses again, earnest.

"I guess it was an experiment." Fuji looks at him levelly. Inui takes the hint and goes.

Fuji changes into tennis shorts for practice. There, he's almost the same as the rest, except for the way they look at him. But Tezuka runs a tight ship. Intentionally or not, no one has much time to wag tongues. They run the beep test till they're dead in the water, Tezuka standing stoically over the rest while they pant with their backs flat on the ground. Fuji stares up at Tezuka's face, still good-looking the wrong side up but spoiled by its look of perpetual constipation, and almost laughs out loud when he thinks, now things are in their proper place.

Later Tezuka pairs up with him for aiming practice. They hit in rare silence, Fuji not trying to draw Tezuka out or rile him up for once. He'll get to his point in his own time. 

When they finish early and go to fetch the next set of weights from the clubroom, Tezuka comes with. He shuts the door and clears his throat and says, ``Sugimoto-sensei asked me to give you six demerit points today.''

"What for?"

"Two for breaking the uniform rule. Four for 'dishonour and/or abuse of the moral code.'"

"And what did you say?" Fuji's genuinely curious. He doesn't care about the demerit points. He never gets any in the first place, and he has no intention of working for the government or winning a scholarship in Japan. 

But these things are paramount for Tezuka, whose sense of duty to the organisations Fuji hates is rivalled only by his certainty in his own judgement. If Tezuka weren't raised in a good family and moderately socialised with his peers, he would be a terrifying person. It's what Fuji actually likes about him.

"I gave you two for the uniform. He was wrong. The moral code doesn't have anything about pants or skirts." Of course. Tezuka has had the moral code of conduct memorised since day one of freshman year. He probably read the student handbook cover to cover over the holidays before junior high. 

Fuji laughs. He feels very, very light. "So you told him off like you do with poor Fujiwara-sensei in maths?"

"I think he knew it wasn't right," Tezuka says slowly, not rising to the bait. "But if I went ahead and did it he wouldn't have said anything."

"Do you think I did the right thing?"

Tezuka pushes at his specs. "I was meaning to ask actually. Why did you do it?"

Fuji picks the least dishonest answer. "I got sick of pretending.''

"Is that how you, uh. Feel?'' Tezuka says, awkward but calm. "Like you're always pretending?''

Fuji watches him watch Echizen. "Don't you?'' 

Echizen leaps for the serve; soars, scores. It's still just a game.

 

*

The end of practice is subdued. Echizen and Momo shower fast and head out together, talking about whatever it is Momo finds to say to Echizen. Kaidoh slinks off alone. Fuji lets them be. Their rejection can only be a second-order hurt. The worst is almost over. Soon, he'll shower and go home in his old skin, shrug his way through dinner and then sleep. He thinks he hasn't been this tired in his life. 

He pushes the door to the clubroom and makes for his locker. Even in the dim light, he can tell he's not alone.

Taka-san.

Somehow, without ever thinking about it directly, he's been worried about this all day.

"Taka-san," he says, moving a little closer. Taka moves a little away.

The racquet Fuji sought to replace on the high shelf leaves his hand, clatters. Taka-san won't look at him. His cheeks, so ready to dimple, flame. Usually this moves Fuji. That Taka-san in his shyness and strength of feeling seems to feel with the people he's close to, that he can't help but take it on himself and have it show on his face as though through water. Usually just looking at him is intimate. 

Fuji can't help it. He reaches out without thinking. 

"Don't," Taka-san says, a little bitten-off sound. He won't look at Fuji, just stares at the hand on his shoulder until the fingers fold in, fall. Taka-san is afraid, and embarrassed. As though Fuji is the one who is a threat, Fuji the one who might wound him in this moment. As though Taka-san is the new leper, the one people watch thirstily with the expectation of shame. As though whatever Fuji is, whatever he  _has_ , blight or gift, Taka-san has it too, was forced to share, and rejects.

*

The next day, Fuji comes in uniform pants. Nothing else about the day is the same as always. 

The staring today has knives in it. The whispers are insidious. On his way to class, someone shoves him from the back. He sees it coming and stays on his feet, makes sure to glare back, but the damage is done. Against his will, Fuji is afraid. For the next few hours is guard is up, and relaxes only slowly.There isn't much people can do while a teacher is in the room, except snicker when his name comes up, kick against his chair legs when he passes. Little things, but they keep his nerves on a knife's edge. "Girl," he hears in the thicket of whispers behind him from time to time. "Girl, girl, girl." This time, there's nothing indulgent or innocuous about the word.

It reminds him of what Yuuta used to say during the hateful phase that turned into the rest of their lives to date. "I can't believe they even let you play, you're such a girl,'' he'd say, his face scrunched up like it did when he faced up to a bully in unconscious imitation. Or, "What does the team think of having a girl on the team.'' _Girl, girl, girl,_ like it was a dirty word, like they hadn't slept in the same bed like kittens, like they hadn't dabbed makeup over each other's playground bruises to hide it from their parents until they both fell flat on the bed, sick with laughing, faces garish and about as alike as they ever looked.

Coming from these people Fuji doesn't even care about, it still feels intimate. It is one of the few words, said in the right tone, that still has the power to wound.

At lunch Fuji times his departure for fifteen minutes after the bell, to maximise queue times and the chances of disappearing into the crowd. He gets up when the room is dim and he is nearly alone. 

But he thought wrong. Hands shove him from the back, bruise his shoulders, snap around his mouth when he tries to shout. He's lifted off his feet without too much strain -- at least two people then -- and he flails, tries to get a finger in an eye or a rib, but the hands at his throat and nose muffles his breath, makes him slow and dizzy and weak. They're moving for the closet under the blackboard, one guy -- Kaneshiro -- has the door slid open and Fuji thrashes. The dark little space stares back at him, moist and horrible as some beast-mouth. He is aware for the first time in a long while of being overpowered, of a fight he cannot win. He tries to yell again, bite down on the hand but it slaps him roundly and he collapses, winded.

"Hey!'' he hears someone yell. "What the hell you think you're doing?'' Eiji. He tries to move, show Eiji _it's me please help me I don't care if you're angry at me but please get someone else_ , but then Oishi and Inui are there too, grabbing a pair of arms each and holding them back. Inui in particular is larger, and not afraid to use his weight. He knocks Kaneshiro out of the way easily and snaps another guy's arms behind his back, and Fuji finds he can breathe again. He glances at the guy on the ground. Yukiguchi. So it was only two guys, after all. He feels lightheaded and vaguely ashamed. "Thanks,'' he says to the ceiling. He's collapsed on the hard cupboard door and feels four-legged, six, his limbs no longer joined and belonging to themselves. Then Eiji's face fills his vision.

"Fuji Fuji,'' he says, "come with me. Oishi and Inui ate while we were waiting for you but I saved you lunch."

Fuji takes a deep breath, lets himself be pulled up. On the way to the cafeteria, he doesn't say a word, still winded. More rarely, neither does Eiji. Fuji regrets all the times he thought he wouldn't have minded Eiji shutting up for a bit and letting a moment be, then smiles a little at his own fickleness. He feels normal again, or will, soon.

"Fuji,'' Eiji says finally over his second tempura prawn. ''I don't get what you did at all. I don't get you.''

Fuji puts down his chopstick. His heart is errant. "That's okay,'' he manages.

"You,'' Eiji says, "are a fucking genius. None of us gets you." He grins like it's a prize. It's not one Fuji really wanted but he manages to smile anyway. 

Then Eiji's monkey arms are around him and holding hard, tight in the centre seat of the cafeteria, spewing his affection for everyone to see. He oscillates like a garden sprinkler, spinning Fuji out this way and that: showy, calculated for effect. Fuji shuts his eyes and holds on and the world blurs for a bit. His eyes sting.

When he finally lets go, Eiji settles back in his chair with a satisfied expression. He makes a c'mere gesture, Eiji-confident. 

"I got a better idea than you, Fujiko. We'll give the best show."

Fuji blinks back at him, floored. Eiji is right. He could never have thought of it himself.

This is what people get wrong about Eiji. They fall for his performance, then they figure it out, think he's all show. They think they know him.

Fuji thinks it's so weird. That sometimes, despite everything, it's kindness that makes you weak and sick and cry.

 

*

Friday. Fuji is the only who isn't in a skirt. One by one the others file into morning practice with their heads hung and the cloth below their uniform shirts improbably bright. 

Oishi's might most accurately be described as bloomers. It's floral, with white undershorts, and shows the fact that his thighs are a smidge thicker than the rest of his body, the small taut round of muscle at the back of his knee squeezing ripely. Eiji's in a real tutu, borrowed from Oishi's stint with the ballet club. Tezuka comes in a tennis skirt, lavender, pursed softly over his narrow hips. It looks newly bought for the occasion. Echizen wears a plaid schoolgirl skirt; Fuji thinks he hears him explain it to Momo as his mother's with a mortified blush on his cheek. Inui's in a bell skirt the rough shape and hue of a lampshade. Momo and Kaidoh came in the same tan Uniqlo A-lines and proceeded to each glare at the other for it, hands bunching at their sides with nervous energy.

They're shy. They fiddle with their hands, floored by the sudden absence of pockets. They wheel and teeter in their wide skirts. They bloom.

Taka-san comes last. He slouches in his pinafore dress that might have been an apron in a previous life. The skirt of it is short denim, it flares wider than the rest for his solid body. His hips must feel the wind. The hair on his thigh and knee and shin is lush, all boy. His eyes are bright, his face clear in the moment he glances at Fuji and flinches away. But his shoulders straighten out and he's honest, even in his guilt, even in his fear. 

Morning practice is effectively useless that day. The weather is horrid. Likely they'll file to class without getting anything done on the courts. A storm is coming, and wind whistles in their long skirts. It swells them, makes umbrellas of cotton. They huddle for warmth. Kaidoh's head is in Momo's sweater, tunnelling like a mole. Eiji hides in Oishi's skirt. Tezuka's hands are tented in Echizen's pockets, his eyes huge behind his glasses, economical mouth gone loose. Echizen's lips are gorged from kissing. They're beset by love. Love is a weird disorder, a disease, a gift without cure. It descends upon them. It rains on their upturned faces. Blight, blight, blight. The rain comes in sheets now, pours, and Fuji's eyes are wide open but he can't see, for the beauty.

  
  



End file.
